Page 67 of Coram House

“He used a canoe. Bill Campbell left one at Coram House, sitting on shore by the boathouse. Rooney would have known it was there. All he had to do was paddle a couple hundred yards, stash it on the rocks, and wait for her there. She went every day—you told me yourself—so he easily could have known. It explains why there weren’t any footprints, why no one saw him. Everything.”

I pause, waiting, triumphant.

“A canoe?” Parker says. His voice doesn’t contain the urgency I’d hoped for.

“I’m not making this up,” I say. “Xander saw a canoe that morning before the police picked him up.”

“The drunk guy? He saw a canoe at Rock Point?” Parker asks. Now he sounds fully awake. “Did he get a look at who was paddling it?”

“Well, no,” I admit. “It was dark.”And he was drunk, I don’t add. “He said it was definitely one person. He couldn’t make anything else out.”

“Alex—” Parker starts, but I cut him off.

“Just… bring him in. Talk to him.”

“We did talk to him. He was so drunk he barely made sense.”

“Try again. Please.” I hear the whine in my voice, but I can’t stop. “I believe Sarah Dale. I think Fred Rooney was in the boat the day Tommy drowned, all those years ago. What if he pushed him in? He could have killed Sister Cecile to cover it up—”

“Alex—”

“Rooney must have known about my book. I mean, didn’t everyone around here know? He must have been afraid I’d find Sister Cecile eventually, figure out what happened. Jesus, Parker, I showed up at his house the day after she died. He was covered in scratches like he’d been in a fight. And he laughed when I asked if Sister Cecile was alive. He laughed.”

There’s a long silence on the phone. I hold my breath. I can’t go to Garcia about this, she’ll think I made it up. If Parker doesn’t believe me, it’s over. Finally, he sighs. “All right. I’ll talk to your Xander. Then we’ll see.”

“He’s not my—”

“Look, Alex, I’m at work. I have to go.”

“Right, yes. Okay. Thanks.”

He hangs up. I look down at my desk, at the photo sitting there. I’d been gripping the edge so tightly my fingernails left little half-moon indentations in the paper. Above them, Sister Cecile stands in her black habit, but the blur has been replaced by the bloody face of the woman in the woods. I blink the image away.

Even though I know they’re the same person, it’s hard to hold them both in my head. Jeannette Leroy, the frail old woman. Sister Cecile, the nun who abused children. What had Parker said the other night? We all have good and bad inside us. I think about Fred Rooney. The sad boy, abused by the adults who should have taken care of him. The teenager who took joy in hurting the other children. The hot, sick feeling of his eyes running over me. The cold sound of his laughter at his house that day.

Maybe goodness is like a tank of gas—enough bad stuff happens and one day you just run empty. Or maybe evil is a seed, born inside all of us, waiting for the right conditions to thrive. I wonder if you feel it—that moment it starts to bloom.

In the morning, there’s a text waiting from Parker. Sent after midnight last night.Arresting FR on a drunk and disorderly. Wanted you to know.Then another text a few minutes later, also from Parker.It’s a start.

A sense of lightness fills me. For a minute, I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling cracks as I try to parse it. Happy, I finally realize. I feel happy, though I have no real right to be. Sister Cecile is dead and I’m no closerto proving Sarah Dale was telling the truth. And the photocopy I found at Xander’s has turned out to be no help at all. None of the birth or death records for Thomases during that time period in Vermont have a last name that starts with U. Plus, I’m supposed to present a preliminary outline to Stedsan in a few days and I’m nowhere near ready. But Fred Rooney has been arrested. And Parker is taking me seriously. And right now, I have to focus if I’m going to drop in on Father Aubry. Sunday morning, he’d said, but it seems indecent to show up before nine.

I pull on my spandex leggings and sneakers. I run under a gray sky, heavy with unfallen snow. I’m getting used to the weather patterns here. The blue-sky days with sunshine that camouflages the biting cold. Then gloomy days like this where the clouds act like a blanket, trapping any vestiges of warmth, holding them close to the earth.

By eight, I’m showered and dressed, my hair blown dry so it doesn’t freeze into icicles. My instincts tell me Father Aubry might still be useful, even if I’m not sure exactly how. At the very least, if Jeannette Leroy attended church, he would have met the woman, might be able to tell me what she was like.

Coffee mug filled to the brim, I sit down in front of a blank notepad and try to focus. I write Sister Cecile’s name in the center of the page. Father Aubry badly wants to be relevant—I sensed that from our first meeting—and to come out looking like the good priest. It’s too late to find Sister Cecile, obviously, but maybe if he knew her he can help me understand how she fits into all this. For starters, what was her relationship like with Fred Rooney? The depositions suggest she was an authoritarian who played favorites. So what did it mean for him to be a favorite? And could she still have had some kind of hold over him, even after all these years? If I can understand that, maybe it will help me understand why he killed her.

I look down at the paper and see I’ve drawn a constellation of questions around Sister Cecile’s name, a line connecting each of them to her like the rays of the sun. The clock on the stove says quarter to ten. Time to go.

Coram House is busy today. Yellow hard hats dot the scaffolding, bright smudges against the gray sky. The high whine of a blade cuttingmetal fills the car as I drive past, down the dirt track. The rectory looks even shabbier in the flat light. The bricks are worn down at the edges and missing huge chunks of mortar. Without the tendrils of ivy that cover the building, I wonder if the whole thing would crumble.

I knock, and the door swings open to reveal an older woman wearing a long dark skirt and sweater, which remind me of a nun’s habit despite all the appliqué birds.

“My name is Alex Kelley,” I say, stepping inside. “Father Aubry is expecting me.”

She frowns at the slush gathering at my feet, as if I should know better than to walk through snow. “Follow me,” she says and begins to haul herself to the second floor, grunting on each step, as if it hurts.

Hours later, it seems, we make it to the door of Father Aubry’s study. “He’s on the phone,” she says. “You may wait here.”

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